God Against the Gods (25 page)

“Bloody Adventures”

Gallus is not warmly recalled by the more pious historians, ancient or modern. “His private life was frivolous, completely taken up with gladiatorial shows and games in the circus,” insists Abbot Guiseppe Ricciotti, a biographer of Julian. “[He] wandered about Antioch at night in search of bloody adventures.”
²⁶
And yet Gallus displayed a surprising aptitude for the role of Caesar—he succeeded in keeping the Persians at bay, crushing one of the Jewish insurrections that still flared up in Palestine, suppressing the bandits and barbarians who threatened the peace of his realm, foiling an assassination attempt organized by Magnentius and even coping with a crisis in the supply of grain at Antioch, the ancient city in Asia Minor that served as the seat of his imperial government, all with a degree of brutality that shocked even the chroniclers who otherwise admired the results.

“Through the murders of many thousands of men—even those too young to pose a threat—Gallus suppressed the Jews,” writes Jerome, “and he put to the torch their cities Diocaesarea, Tiberias, and Diospolis and many towns.”
²⁷

Constantius II, in fact, apparently decided that he had chosen
too
well in Gallus. “The moment that Constantius had invested him with the purple,” insists Julian, “he at once began to be jealous of him.”
²⁸
His anxieties were stoked by the agents and informers who told the emperor that Gallus aspired to not merely serve but replace him. When Gallus invited his younger brother to join him at the theater during a visit to Nicomedia—how the two of them must have marveled at their remarkable new circumstances!—the rendezvous was regarded as suspicious and even subversive by the watchful Constantius. Only three years after releasing Gallus from confinement and raising him to the purple, the ruthless and remorseless emperor resolved to correct the mistake that he believed he had made in letting Gallus live.

Now, once again, Constantius issued a summons to his cousin, inviting Gallus and Constantina to join him at his winter quarters in Milan. Constantina, an active and expert intriguer, surely understood that her brother’s intentions were not benign, and the couple did not make haste to answer the call. Indeed, when Constantina fell ill of a fever and died en route, Gallus tarried at Antioch, fearful of what might happen at court without his wife, the emperor’s sister, to speak in his defense. Constantius II urged Gallus on his way with an encouraging letter that suggested he intended to grant Gallus the title of Augustus and make him coemperor. Gallus dutifully if reluctantly resumed his journey toward the imperial court—but he never arrived.

As he neared Milan, Gallus and his entourage stopped for the night at a palace. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself surrounded by a death squad under the command of one of the dreaded
agentes in rebus
in service to Constantius II. Gallus was seized, stripped of his imperial robes and taken under guard to Pola, the very same place where Constantine the Great had arranged for the arrest and murder of Constantius’s half brother so many years before: “The blood of Crispus,” writes Rendall, “still cried from its prison walls.”
²⁹
With hands bound and head forced down for the convenience of the executioner, Gallus was beheaded and the body was discarded without the simple decency of a Christian burial. And so the extermination of Constantine’s brothers and nephews that had begun on his death was nearly complete. Julian was now the sole survivor.

“Let the Curiosity to Know the Future Be Silenced Forever”

The pagan majority that had taken hope in the short-lived reign of Magnentius now confronted a Christian emperor whose authority was unchecked. Constantius II adopted the title “His Eternity” in place of “His Majesty,”
³⁰
and his belief in the Only True God seemed to burn hotter in him than it had in his father. “What I will,” announced Constantius, “should be the law of the Church.”
³¹
Starting in 353, the year of Magentius’s suicide, the emperor issued a series of imperial decrees that enforced and expanded the formal persecution of paganism. The pagan restoration appeared to be stillborn, and the victory of God against the gods was assured—or so it seemed at this moment in history when the Roman empire still teetered between monotheism and polytheism.

First, the rituals of sacrifice carried out by night—and later
all
sacrifices—were formally banned. According to a decree issued in 354, the pagan temples were to be closed and, two years later, the use of pagan statuary in rituals of worship was condemned. All the practitioners of divination were proscribed—soothsayers and seers, astrologers and augurs, sorcerers and “readers of entrails”—and even the most distinguished of pagan philosophers might be tortured on suspicion of having practiced black magic. “Let the curiosity to know the future,” decreed Constantius II, “be silenced forever.”
³²
At last, the death penalty was officially adopted as the punishment for what was now the crime of paganism. “For if anyone consulted with a soothsayer about the squeaking of a shrew-mouse,” complains the pagan Ammianus, “or a meeting with a weasel or a similar omen, or applied an old wife’s charm to soothe pain—which even medical authority permits—he was indicted from an unknown source, dragged into court, and suffered the death penalty.”
³³

By 357, when Constantius paid a state visit to the old imperial capital at Rome, the citizenry witnessed a display that seemed to symbolize the abandonment of the oldest, most cherished traditions of Roman paganism: the Christian emperor demanded that the altar to the goddess of Victory be hauled out of the chambers of the Roman Senate. By long tradition, the pagan aristocrats who served in the Senate had paused before the statue and sprinkled a pinch of incense on the altar fire, thus making the offering to the goddess who was believed to preserve the
Pax Deorum
and the
Pax Romana
.

Yet, significantly, a statue of the goddess herself was permitted to remain on display, and the removal of the altar was only temporary—Christians and pagans would still be fighting over the same issue a half century later. Constantius II himself may have issued decrees that appealed to the Christian rigorists who were his ardent supporters—and the laws may have been enforced in Constantinople and the eastern empire—but they were still mostly a dead letter in the more distant provinces and Rome itself, the seat of classical paganism. On the same visit to Rome in 357, for example, Constantius II still found it convenient and appropriate to perform his duties as
Pontifex Maximus
, visiting pagan temples and making appointments to the pagan priesthoods, both of which continued to enjoy the support of the imperial treasury.

Christianity itself, in fact, was tugged and torqued in so many directions by its various contending rigorists, each one condemning the others as apostates and blasphemers, that none of them could plausibly claim to act with the authority of the “orthodox” and “catholic” church. “It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous,” warned Bishop Hilary of Poitiers, “that there are as many creeds as opinions among men.”
³⁴
Indeed, the same zeal that had sustained Christian true believers during the persecutions of the pagan emperors inspired the dissidents who were now persecuted by the Christian emperor.

At Alexandria, the churches where orthodox clergy still presided were put under siege by the legions of the Arian emperor: “Many were killed who may deserve the name of martyrs,” reports Gibbon. “Bishops and presbyters were treated with cruel ignominy; consecrated virgins were stripped naked, scourged and violated.”
³⁵
At Rome, rival candidates for the papacy were championed by rival mobs, and the Christian rioters spilled one another’s blood “in the streets, in the public places, in the baths, and even in the churches.”
³⁶
And, at Constantinople, more than 3000 Christians lost their lives in the battle for the bishopric of the imperial capital: “One of the ecclesiastical historians has observed, as a real fact, not as a figure of rhetoric,” Gibbon points out, “that the well before the church overflowed with a stream of blood.”
³⁷

The most fanatical of the Donatists in North Africa, known as Circumcellions (“vagabonds”), rose up in open insurrection in defense of their rigorous strain of Christianity. Armed only with crude weaponry, the poor folk who rallied to the Church of the Martyrs carried out attacks on orthodox clergy and pagan priests alike. Significantly, they used the term “Israelite” to identify the stout wooden clubs that they carried, thus invoking the example of the original holy warriors of the Hebrew Bible. When routed by the imperial cavalry, the Circumcellions were known to seek assistance in achieving martyrdom by stopping passersby on the highway and offering to pay them to deliver a coup de grâce—and to kill them if they refused the offer.

“The great Christian commonwealth seemed drifting into helpless anarchy,” writes Gerald Henry Rendall. “Bishops had become so many centres of confusion and ringleaders of heresy.”
³⁸

Even after the practice of paganism had been formally criminalized by Constantius II, in fact, the politics of religion in the Roman empire remained so unsettled that some pagans still hoped—and expected—that the Christian revolution would be defeated by its own true believers, so numerous and so fiercely at odds with one another. “No wild beasts are so hostile to mankind,” Ammianus famously remarked, “as are most of the Christians in their savagery toward one another.”
³⁹
Magnentius may have failed in his effort to restore the worship of the old gods and goddesses, but the pagans consoled themselves with the simple fact that paganism was still the preferred faith of the majority of Romans. What they did not yet suspect was that the man who was determined to succeed where Magnentius had failed was not some disgruntled pagan general but the last surviving orphan of Macellum, the young Christian prince called Julian.

CHAPTER NINE

THE SECRET PAGAN

Gods, Empresses, and Julian’s Unlikely Rise to the Imperial Throne

And shall I write about things not to be spoken of and divulge what ought not to be divulged? Shall I utter the unutterable?

—Julian, Hymn to the Mother of the Gods

Julian, too, was summoned to the imperial court at Milan by Constantius II. On the way, the ship that was carrying him back to Italy called at a port near Ilion, the site of ancient Troy, and he took advantage of the opportunity to visit the shrines that celebrated the gods and heroes who would have been deeply familiar to any educated Roman, pagan or Christian. But an incident that took place during his brief sojourn at Ilion offers us an early and intriguing glimpse of the dark and dangerous secret that Julian was still guarding from all but his closest confidants.

Julian was welcomed to Ilion by the local bishop, a man called Pegasius, who escorted him to the pagan temples that remained open in apparent defiance of the imperial decree that all such structures be destroyed. Unlike his more rigorous brethren in the church, who carried out the decree with pleasure and even ardor, Pegasius had made only a gesture of compliance by removing a few blocks of stone from the exterior façades—he sought to fool the Christian rigorists into thinking that the temples had been emptied and defaced. Now the bishop boldly conducted the emperor’s cousin into the shrines of Athena and Hector and Achilles, where Julian noticed that the altar fires were still burning and the statuary were still anointed with oil.

“What does this mean?” Julian asked the bishop. “Do the people of Ilion offer sacrifices?”

“Is it not natural that they should worship a brave man who was their own citizen,” replied Pegasius, “just as we worship the martyrs ?”
¹

Julian’s ulterior motive, as he later discloses in his own writings, was to take the temperature of Bishop Pegasius. Was he one of the Christian zealots who condemned paganism as nothing more than devil worship? Or did he secretly harbor somewhat warmer feelings for Athena and Achilles? Such questions could not be safely asked aloud, but Julian was watchful for some sign of the bishop’s unspoken attitude toward paganism.

The telling fact, as Julian carefully noted, was something that the bishop did
not
do. The most zealous Christians, as Julian knew, displayed their fear and contempt by making certain unmistakable gestures when confronted with pagan artifacts, which they regarded as demon-infested. “For this is the height of their theology,” Julian writes in his account of the incident, “to hiss at demons and to make the sign of the cross upon their foreheads.”
²
But the bishop, like Julian himself, was perfectly at ease in the pagan shrines and, in fact, eager to show him “all the statues in perfect preservation”
³
—and so the two men may well have recognized in each other a kindred spirit.

At that moment, Julian may appear to us as a highly civilized Christian who was still able to appreciate the literary and historical resonance of what he beheld in the pagan shrines. But the fact is that he had already renounced the Only True God and embraced the old god and goddesses whom the Christians regarded as demons and devils. He was already at risk for purely political reasons—Gallus, a Christian, was only the latest example of Constantius II’s willingness to kill his cousins—but the open avowal of paganism would have put him at even deadlier peril. For now, but not for long, Julian’s new faith remained unspoken.

The Purified and the Perfected

We do not know exactly when, where or how Julian made the fateful decision for paganism. Both Julian and Gallus had been raised as Christians during their years of confinement—they were duly baptized and granted communion, instructed in theology and the Bible, raised through the ranks of Christian initiation from “the purified” to “the illuminated” to “the perfected”
⁴
and eventually admitted to the lower rank of the clergy as “lectors,” an office whose duties included reading aloud from the Bible to fellow congregants at church services. As an exercise in Christian piety, the young princes even built a martyrium, a shrine that marked the grave where the mortal remains of a local martyr called Mama were buried and where the suffering of the martyr was recalled and honored.

“[Julian and Gallus] were cultured and educated in a manner corresponding to the dignity of their birth,” reports the fifth-century church historian Sozomen. “Their habits and actions indicated no dereliction from piety. They respected the clergy and other good people and persons zealous for doctrine; they repaired regularly to church and rendered due homage to the tombs of the martyrs.”
⁵

Among Julian’s first instructors in the fundamentals of Christianity was Eusebius of Nicomedia, the Arian bishop who had baptized Constantine on his deathbed and, as it happens, a distant relation of Julian’s dead mother. Eusebius, of course, tutored Julian in the theology of Arius, which was not regarded as heresy in the imperial household of Constantius II. When Eusebius was ultimately raised to the rank of bishop of Constantinople, other attentive priests took his place as the royal tutor. “From the poison of Paganism,” insists historian Gerald Henry Rendall, Julian “was to be guarded inviolate.”
⁶

What Julian came to regard as toxic, however, was Christianity itself. “What he knew from personal observation of Christianity, what he witnessed of its moral power, was not encouraging,” Rendall frankly concedes. After all, the murderer of his father was a pious Christian, and so were most of the men and women who acted as his jailors. “The man he most hated for his crimes,” writes Rendall, referring to Constantius II, “was the man most loud in his Christian profession.”
⁷
Of all his many caregivers, in fact, the only one who seemed to earn his trust and affection was an aging eunuch called Mardonius, whom Julian describes as “a barbarian, by the gods and goddesses”
⁸
and who may well have been, as the historian (and abbot) Giuseppe Ricciotti puts it, “an honest pagan.”
⁹

Blood and Outrage

Mardonius was a family slave who was assigned to serve as pedagogue to the seven-year-old Julian, first at Nicomedia and possibly later at Macellum, the same function he had performed years before for his mother, Basilina: “He was my mother’s guide,” as Julian puts it, “through the poems of Homer and Hesiod.”
¹⁰
Julian describes him as a “curmudgeon”—“boorishness he called dignity, lack of taste he called sobriety”
¹¹
—but he does not conceal the affection he feels for the old man who represented his only living link to his family of origin: “Among so many memories of blood and outrage,” writes Ricciotti, “only that of Mardonius came to [Julian’s] mind like a beam of light shining in the darkness.”
¹²

Julian recalls Mardonius as a strict, even puritanical schoolmaster, teaching him to walk with his eyes cast down to avoid even a glimpse of the forbidden pleasures that were on display in the streets of Nicomedia—“the pantomime, the dance, the horse-race,” as Rendall writes, “everything that to a Roman boy savoured at all of fun or excitement.”
¹³
Julian attests that, thanks to his watchful tutor, he never attended the theater until “I had more hair on my chin than on my head.”
¹⁴
Fatefully, Mardonius used the poetry of Homer to pound Julian into the mold of a civilized man.

“Have you a passion for horse races?” he asks his young charge. “There is one in Homer, very cleverly described. Take the book and study it.”
¹⁵

Constantius II issued an order that Julian was not to be instructed in the tales of the gods and goddesses that were the core texts of classical paganism. At least one of his tutors gamely attempted to comply, or so the ancient sources insist, but it turned out to be impossible. Any Roman of the higher classes, whether Christian or pagan, would have studied the same pagan writings, which were regarded even in late antiquity as classics and still provided the curriculum of the basic course of study called
paideia
. Mardonius, in any event, plainly paid no attention to the imperial decree in choosing the books that he assigned Julian to read. And Julian, like his mother, read them not just dutifully but joyfully.

“Some men have a passion for horses, others for birds, others for savage animals,” writes Julian of himself, “but I for books.”
¹⁶
And he credits his cherished teacher for opening his eyes to the improving truth to be found in such pagan poets as Homer and Hesiod, such pagan philosophers as Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus: “This old man convinced me that if I should emulate those famous men in all things,” he recalls, “I should become better than my former self.”
¹⁷

By his “former self,” Julian can be understood to mean his Christian self, although he is guarded about the source of his pagan instruction or the time and place of his formal conversion to paganism. He refers to the years he spent as a professing Christian as the time “when I wandered, as it were, in darkness.”
¹⁸
But he openly declares that the pagan philosophers served as a buffer against the “cruelty” and “harshness” of the strange and tragic childhood that Constantius II imposed on him: “The gods, by means of philosophy, caused me to remain untouched by it and unharmed by it,” recalls Julian.
¹⁹
And he claims to have been inspired by King Helios—the same solar god that Constantius the Pale and Constantine the Great worshiped as
Sol Invictus
—“from my earliest years.”
²⁰

“This at least I am permitted to say without sacrilege,” reveals Julian, scrupulously guarding the secrets of the mystery religions to which he was later admitted, “that from my childhood an extraordinary longing for the rays of the god penetrated deep into my soul.”
²¹

Later, the ancient Christian historians looked for clues of Julian’s pagan tendencies in the otherwise unremarkable events of his childhood. Gallus and Julian practiced their rhetorical skills by engaging in mock debates over the relative merits of monotheism and polytheism—Julian, they insist, always preferred to argue on behalf of the pagan cause and did so with a fervor that betrayed his real feelings on the subject. When the boys set to work on building the martyrium, they report, the portion erected by Gallus was sturdy and strong, but Julian’s handiwork fell under its own weight, “as if the earth refused to accept the labors of the future apostate.”
²²
And they insist on blaming Julian’s ultimate apostasy on the defects in his early Christian instruction—the priests and bishops who were his first teachers, after all, had been Arians: “They were not themselves,” observes Augustus Neander, “thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of Christianity.”
²³

Still, the fact remains that Julian himself revealed none of his pagan interests or inclinations during his years as an inmate at Macellum. “He was by nature a wistful dreamy child,” writes Rendall, “full of strange reveries.” Yet he was also an alert and aloof child, and necessarily so: “A remarkably beautiful character was strangely marred,” Rendall observes. “Hard experiences made him day by day increasingly and sadly worldly-wise: reserve, distrust, dissimulation became a second nature to him.”
²⁴
No one yet suspected what visions he beheld in his own imagination or what powerful passions were building up inside the young man as he dutifully read aloud from the Bible in the chapel at Macellum.

The Bridge That Cannot Be Recrossed

When Gallus was called to the capital and raised to the rank of Caesar in 351, Julian, too, was released from captivity. By now, however, he was already so accomplished at grammar and rhetoric that his new tutors at Constantinople recommended to Constantius II that Julian be permitted to pursue his studies at a place where he would find scholars who were able to teach him something he did not already know. Such praise only stoked the anxieties of Constantius II—if Julian were regarded so highly in the imperial capital, might he not attract the attention of conspirators in search of a candidate for yet another coup d’état?

So Constantius II sent Julian from Constantinople to Nicomedia, a place where he would be less likely to attract attention to himself. But first the young man was required to swear an oath that he would not attend the lectures of Libanius, a pagan Sophist whose discourses were so popular that they rivaled the race course and the theater as venues for public entertainment, or so Libanius himself boasted. Julian gave the promise of good behavior that his cousin demanded—and then he promptly engaged one of Libanius’s student to take notes of what the famous orator had to say and bring them to Julian after every lecture.

The promise that Constantius II extracted from Julian is doubly significant—we are reminded that pagans were still influential public figures even if paganism was already being persecuted, and that Constantius II was still concerned about the influence that a charismatic pagan might exert over a prince of the blood. And his anxiety, as it turns out, was justified. Julian, at liberty in the cities where Hellenism had flowered—first Nicomedia and later Ephesus, Pergamum and Athens—sought out the practitioners of the arcane and mystical pagan philosophy called Neoplatonism. Now a man in his early twenties, he was eager to be formally (but secretly) admitted into the mystery religions that were still the lively rivals of Christianity.